Google Search Structure Data Markup Helper Explained

Knowledge graph, google highlighter, snippets, cards, structure data, schema and so on. Are all the new kids on the block that emerged after google’s continues effort to create semantic artificial intelligence smart search. What Structure Data Markup does is to arrange data from your site in a relevant organized way.

The word Schema, for example, derives from the psychology field to describe pattern of thought or behavior that organizes categories of information and the relationships among them.
All these new A.I. concepts can take an SEO professional back, and concerns arise about the feature of SEO. Some even say SEO is dead, so then many efforts are put in other non-SEO tactics like inbound marketing, social media, PPC and so on.. But the true is SEO can never be dead as long the is a web page there will always be SEO.

Lets remember that SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and SEO professionals will continue to adapt new methods to optimize a site and so it can be search-engine friendly. In other words, a site will always need to be optimize in one way or another so the engines can index it, categorized it, rank it and display it; regardless if some folks might think SEO is irrelevant.

Think of Structure Data Markup as an Organized Paten

For example, a good inbound marketer could get away bribing traffic to a site without SEO, but not optimizing the site is like taking one slide of pizza out of a whole pie. As a marketer, you want to take advantage of other conversion rate optimization approaches that the new SEO offers, and in which your competition is not using, yet. For example, inbound markers can use Structure Data Markup to Tag an email template so GMail can present the data in new and useful ways.

Some of these site optimizations techniques as we see come in a form of Structured Data. To explain how structure data works is quite complex, yet visually easy to get it. Please read about structure data to get familiarized with it. Below are some sample on how a website with structure data (categorized pieces of of data) like: text, images, video, author, dates, places, recipe title, recipe ingredients, recipe videos — on a regular blog post.

To put it In a simpler terms, lets use Lupo’s Heart Break Hotel concert hall as an example. When a person executes search (query) for Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel, Google no only shows the URL name and address, but it can serve more relevant information such as a list of the events, and the dates shown; below.

This is a sample of a Rich snippet for a page with multiple events.

This is a sample of a Rich snippet for a page with multiple events.

In the back-end it looks as follows:

This is achieved by adding a markup of the events on this particular site by utilizing Markup Structure Data, the next time Google crawls your site the event data will be available for rich snippets on search results pages.

Two ways to get up Markup:

1. The easy way (not code needed) using Google Highlighter tool

For those who are not technically savvy with code, google created a tool that allows you to add data in a easy visual way. It is called two names Google Structure Data Markup Helper and/or Google Highlighter. The only difference between those two is that Google Structure Data Markup Helper tool allows you to add additional information from you page such as Article section, Article body, URL, publisher, and Page Count, add missing tags and much more.

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The easy way (not code needed) use Google Highlighter

Here is a free training video that explains in an easy way how to use Google highlighter

How to get to Google Highlighter

The tech way use Google’s Structure Data Markup Helper Tool

This tool has additional options to mark up more data then Google Highlighter tool

Highlight all the date elements of your page (title, author, image, and so on)

Hit “create HTML.” You can then download your HTML Source with Microdata Markup

Add the Structured Data to your source code. After you are done highlighting data, you will need to edit your web page’s HTML source, using the highlighted text as a guideline for what to add. The schema.org documentation lists all properties available for this type. If you see any properties you are interested in that are not available in Markup Helper, you may add them manually.

Test your Structured Data

After implementing the recommended markup on your website, use the Structured Data Testing Tool to make sure Google understands it correctly.

By Mary

Head of Integrated Digital Marketing and International Outreach

Maris Pozo is an Integrated Digital Marketer and member of the American Marketing Association, with over 9 years of experience on the agency side-and has worked with clients such as HP, LATimes, and Monster.com--In bilingual markets in Spain and U.S.